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Wed, 19 Feb 2014 15:45:11 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.16http://allthingsd.com/theme/images/logo-rss.jpgAll Things Digitalhttp://allthingsd.com/
14422People Are More Freaked Out by Hacking Than Tracking, Survey Findshttp://allthingsd.com/20131220/people-are-more-freaked-out-by-hacking-than-tracking-survey/
http://allthingsd.com/20131220/people-are-more-freaked-out-by-hacking-than-tracking-survey/#commentsFri, 20 Dec 2013 11:54:42 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=380199When asked to choose which is more important to them, protecting their personal information online or protecting their online behavior, respondents to a recent survey said hacking is a bigger concern than tracking.

Some 75 percent of those surveyed said they are worried about hackers stealing their personal information, while 54 percent are worried about their browsing history being tracked by advertisers.

That’s according to interviews with 1,000 American voters in November commissioned by the Computer and Communications Industry Association and conducted by Benenson Strategy Group and American Viewpoint.

When asked to choose which is scarier, respondents almost unanimously chose getting hacked.

At least half of the people said they or someone they know had their email breached, they or someone they know had received a suspicious email from someone who was hacked, and they or someone they know had a financial account compromised online.

Of course, the computer industry is well served by seeing one the fears of its main business models pale in comparison to the threat of evil hackers.

But perhaps it’s a reasonable question to ask at a time when online privacy fears often seem to run as high as online security fears.

The study found 74 percent of recipients agreed that the federal government needs to better police identity theft.

But what about the so-very-2013 threat of the government itself accessing people’s info? Just 15 percent said that was their top privacy and security concern.

The other interesting aspect of the survey was its finding that people seem to be stepping up their personal privacy and security efforts. This seems to be a very tech-savvy group.

Of those polled, 83 percent said they put passwords on their devices, 76 percent said they use different passwords for each service, 68 percent said they have adjusted their privacy settings on a social network or online account, 65 percent said they have set their browser to disable cookies, and 65 percent said they read the privacy policies for websites they visit. (Okay, really? That seems hard to believe.)

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131220/people-are-more-freaked-out-by-hacking-than-tracking-survey/feed/0No Cheap Shots With This $300 Bluetooth Basketballhttp://allthingsd.com/20131125/no-cheap-shots-with-this-300-bluetooth-basketball/
http://allthingsd.com/20131125/no-cheap-shots-with-this-300-bluetooth-basketball/#commentsMon, 25 Nov 2013 14:00:44 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=374709Basketball season is under way. Time to sweep the hardwoods, lace up your sneakers, charge the ball, and fire up your smartphone.

Wait, what?

That was my thought process when I started playing with 94Fifty, a $295 basketball made by a company called InfoMotion Sports. Even friends who saw the 94Fifty ball sitting on its inductive charger couldn’t help but crack jokes.

“Charging your basketball, are you?” my colleague Ina Fried said.

The indoor/outdoor ball looks and feels like a regular basketball. It meets regulation weight and size. But, inside, it’s filled with nine different sensors, including accelerometers and a gyroscope, as well as a Bluetooth chip.

This is so the ball can sense and send your data — mostly, your ball-handling skills and your shot arc — to a mobile app. The mobile app then gives you instant feedback, so you can tweak your mechanics as you work on your game.

InfoMotion says the ball is meant for regular consumers, and for coaches and teams, but after playing with this ball, I’m convinced that it’s something that might appeal more to the latter group.

94Fifty falls into a small but growing category of sports products that are leveraging the powers of technology to deliver better data. I’ve spoken to a company making basketballs that beep when your shot release is technically sound, and there’s another making a wristband and net sensor that track shot accuracy.

This tech goes beyond basketballs, too. There are now soccer balls with sensors; football helmets that are supposed to help detect concussions; and a digital golf glove that measures grip pressure.

The 94Fifty ball looks like a regular basketball, and meets regulation weight and size, but is packed with technology.

A little bit about my relationship with basketball: I played for a couple years in college, though it was by no means an illustrious career. Still, I love the game. So, over the past week, I’ve taken the 94Fifty to a local gym a few times, and played with it for about an hour each session.

My first thought: Holy smokes, this is an expensive basketball. For $295 dollars you can buy … a lot of basketballs. When I was a kid, the appeal of basketball was that it was an inexpensive sport to take up.

My second reaction was disappointment that this high-tech ball doesn’t give you a broad snapshot of how you’re doing in a game of pickup or one-on-one. So you can’t just play for 20 or 30 minutes and then grab your smartphone and have the app tell you something useful. It’s very drills-focused. It also doesn’t track how many shots you’ve made.

But the ball does what the company says it will do. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of it, because I didn’t have other tracking mechanisms in place, nor did I have a top-tier coach with me to tell me if the app seemed legit.

The 94Fifty mobile app lets you go head to head with friends on the court, and records stats like your shot release and arc.

However, I felt like 94Fifty was pretty accurate when it gauged my shot arc (which I sometimes exaggerated, for testing purposes) or my dribble speed.

The ball initially takes a few hours to fully charge, and should last for about eight hours of play. To get connected to the 94Fifty mobile app — which is only available for iOS, though an Android app is in the works — you have to activate Bluetooth on your iPhone and then bounce the ball four times.

Right now, the ball only registers that you’re shooting after you’ve received a chest pass. If you don’t have anyone to chest-pass to you, you have to spin the ball in the air to simulate a chest pass. This is fine when you’re shooting free throws, but can feel a little awkward when you’re coming off the move to fire up a 20-footer.

In the app, there are four sections devoted to skills: Workout, Head to Head, Skill Training, and Social Challenge. The other parts include your Dashboard and Ball Settings. You’re supposed to name the ball. I named mine “Coach K.”

The app doesn’t track shot accuracy, so you have to enter in shots made yourself. Here, you can see that my AllThingsD colleague Thomas shot way better than I did.

The Workout and Skill Training parts were my preferred practice tools. In Workout, there are more than a dozen drills, ranging in difficulty from “Playground” to “College Star” to “Pro.” You can’t progress to the next level in the app without meeting the established goal. These were not exactly easy. One example: Attain 70 percent shot accuracy and an average shot speed of 0.75 seconds while shooting 15-footers.

Since the ball doesn’t track your shot accuracy, it’s up to you to manually enter in how many shots you’ve made — which means that you could, theoretically, cheat on that part. But if you’re still not releasing the ball quickly off the “pass,” you won’t make it to the next level.

Skills Training is similar to Workout, except it’s less about moving up to the Pros and more about focusing on individual skill sets you’d like to work on.

In Head to Head, you take turns practicing and tracking your skills with up to four other people on the court with you. The “Social Challenge” section of the app sounds a lot more interactive than it really is: You simply share your score to Twitter when you’ve completed a 94Fifty drill.

94Fifty is really better for players and coaches focused on drills and improving their skills; it’s not as useful for a game of pickup on the playground.

Overall, my 94Fifty experience was positive, and I liked some of the feedback I got from the app — like when it told me I had too much arc on my shot and needed to bring down my release point. The app also offers audio feedback.

But being tied to a mobile app also kind of bummed me out. Throughout my “training session,” I kept going over to the sideline to check the app and select a new skill set. I can’t remember ever having checked my phone or tablet this much during a sport before. In fact, the iPod was relatively new and the iPhone didn’t exist when I played on a team. (Now I feel old.)

This is why I can see the whole system being more beneficial to coaches and teams, who have staffers around who can help relay information while players practice mostly uninterrupted.

If you have a lot of extra cash lying around, and you love basketball as much as I do, you’ll have some fun with the 94Fifty ball. But you also don’t need to spend that much to get your game on.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131125/no-cheap-shots-with-this-300-bluetooth-basketball/feed/0Google in $17 Million Settlement Over Improper Web Trackinghttp://allthingsd.com/20131118/google-in-17-million-settlement-over-improper-web-tracking/
http://allthingsd.com/20131118/google-in-17-million-settlement-over-improper-web-tracking/#commentsMon, 18 Nov 2013 20:42:46 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=373378Google has agreed to pay $17 million to settle allegations brought by 37 states and the District of Columbia that it placed unauthorized tracking “cookies” on Web browsers in 2011 and 2012.

“Consumers should be able to know whether there are other eyes surfing the web with them,” said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a statement. “By tracking millions of people without their knowledge, Google violated not only their privacy, but also their trust.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131118/google-in-17-million-settlement-over-improper-web-tracking/feed/0Under Armour Buys MapMyFitness for $150 Millionhttp://allthingsd.com/20131114/under-armour-buys-mapmyfitness-for-150-million/
http://allthingsd.com/20131114/under-armour-buys-mapmyfitness-for-150-million/#commentsThu, 14 Nov 2013 14:40:03 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=372752Performance-gear maker Under Armour, which has been increasing its efforts in the digital-fitness space, has said it will acquire MapMyFitness for $150 million. Austin-based MapMyFitness makes a family of iOS and Android apps — MapMyRun, MapMyRide and MapMyWalk — that track workouts and allow people to share those maps through the apps. MapMyFitness claims over 20 million registered users.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131114/under-armour-buys-mapmyfitness-for-150-million/feed/0Facebook Brings Ad Tracking to Your Phonehttp://allthingsd.com/20131016/facebook-brings-ad-tracking-to-your-phone/
http://allthingsd.com/20131016/facebook-brings-ad-tracking-to-your-phone/#commentsWed, 16 Oct 2013 19:03:22 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=365693Last year, Facebook introduced the Facebook Exchange, which let advertisers “retarget” Facebook users based on their travels outside of Facebook.

Now Facebook is going to do more retargeting, and it is going to bring it to your phone. And unlike the retargeting Facebook introduced last year, Facebook isn’t working with partners on this one — it’s handling the whole thing itself.

Is that a big deal? Facebook certainly isn’t playing it up that way. Yesterday, when it announced the move, it did so via a low-key blog post with an oblique headline.

It is possible that some of Facebook’s ad tech partners may think it’s a big deal, though, since Facebook is now competing with them — and giving itself a huge advantage in that competition.

The basics: The old Facebook Exchange lets advertisers use “cookies” to find Facebook users who have been to their sites. So Virgin Airlines, for instance, can keep showing you ads on Facebook after you’ve checked out prices for that San Francisco to New York flight on VirginAmerica.com.

While Facebook ultimately sells ad inventory through the exchange, it also keeps a bit of distance from the process, since advertisers are using data supplied by third-party vendors to target their customers. And Facebook doesn’t allow them to utilize its own data about its users when they do that.

The new product Facebook announced yesterday is different in a couple key ways:

Unlike Facebook Exchange, it will work on mobile, which means advertisers can track users who visited their apps or mobile sites, and advertisers can run ads on Facebook’s mobile app, too.

The other key difference is that Facebook itself is going to run this targeting effort. Instead of cookies, which don’t work on mobile anyway, Facebook will use its own code to track Facebook users on advertisers’ sites. And unlike Facebook Exchange, Facebook’s in-house targeting effort will also use Facebook’s proprietary data set about its users.

Facebook’s messaging here is that the new ads are simply an extension of what it has already been doing with its “custom audience” ads, which are supposed to help advertisers find people on Facebook using data they’ve collected about their offline behavior.

And Facebook insists that the new product isn’t competing with Facebook Exchange. It said it assumes that more sophisticated advertisers who know how to use ad tech will use the Exchange, and that it will offer its own targeting system to smaller buyers who would never use targeting otherwise.

And that could all be true.

But if I’m one of the ad tech players that was super-stoked about Facebook Exchange last year, I might be a bit worried now: Facebook is selling a product that competes with mine — even if it says it doesn’t mean to compete with me. And Facebook is selling that product on mobile, where all of its growth is coming from, and where I would love to be myself.

Nomi, a New York City-based startup that tracks shoppers’ mobile phones to help retail shops gather data on customer activity in their stores, is close to landing a Series B investment, sources told AllThingsD. Accel Partners is expected to be a new investor in the round.

The new infusion of cash is expected to be around $10 million, one source said.

Nomi CEO Marc Ferrentino declined to comment.

Earlier this year, Nomi raised a $3 million Series A investment from First Round Capital, Greycroft Partners, Forerunner Ventures and SV Angel.

Nomi is among a handful of startups, including Euclid and RetailNext, that are gaining traction with retailers by bringing metrics popular in Web analytics, such as conversion rate and bounce rate, to brick-and-mortar retail shops that historically know very little about who walks in and out of their stores each day.

Though the methods for gathering data on shoppers differ from startup to startup, the goal is much the same: Give offline commerce operations more granular insight into how many people are visiting their stores, how frequently, and where they are spending time inside a given shop during a visit.

Nomi works with a company’s existing technology or installs its own hardware that can track the Wi-Fi signals emanating from a shopper’s smartphone, assuming that they have one. But the startup attempts to go a step further, by telling retailers the identity of shoppers visiting their stores, assuming shoppers opt-in in some fashion.

In doing so, Nomi is selling retailers on the ability to connect the dots between what a shopper does online and what they do in stores, allowing the opportunity to personalize offers and recommendations to this person both in stores and online.

At the same time, similar efforts — even those not linking phones to a person’s identity — have drawn the ire of privacy advocates and politicians alike, causing some retailers to pull out of experimenting with similar technologies.

That’s one reason that the approach of one competitor, Euclid, is different. The Palo Alto-based startup, which has raised more than $23 million, does track phones, and provides stores with metrics such as unique visitors, customer frequency and duration of visit. With this information, stores can benchmark themselves against other similar types of stores in the Euclid network.

But Euclid has refused retailer requests to try to connect a phone ID with a shopper’s real identity.

Some attempts require searching the website for tiny “Help” text, scanning online support forums, clicking the “Are you sure?” button three times, or calling customer support. Then — just when you think you’re out — you’ll continue to get emails from the company, like an ex that won’t get the hint.

My column this week focuses on how to delete accounts for some well-known Web apps and services. This isn’t assuming that you want to delete these, but in case you ever do, this might be a helpful guide.

A few things worth noting: This is different from “unsubscribing,” which removes your name from email mailing lists but doesn’t necessarily remove you from an account or database. Also, deleting a mobile app from your smartphone — either by “X”-ing out the app on iPhone or uninstalling it through settings on other smartphones — doesn’t mean you are no longer signed up for that service online.

And just because you successfully delete an account doesn’t mean your digital data goes away entirely. Some companies hold on to your data for 30 days, 90 days or for an indeterminate amount of time.

Facebook: Deleting your Facebook account is relatively straightforward. There are two options — deactivation and permanent deletion. Go to the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of your home page, select Help, then Visit the Help Center and Manage Your Account. On the left-hand side of the screen you’ll see a list of options, including Deleting and Deactivating Accounts.

Deactivating your account means that Facebook will still keep your profile information somewhere in the event that you decide to rejoin. Hitting the permanent Delete My Account button means that everything goes and you won’t be able to reactivate your account. It can take up to a month to fully delete an account, and your data still will remain in backup servers for up to 90 days.

Base image: Shutterstock / rvlsoft

Twitter: Fortunately, Twitter requires far fewer than 140 steps when it comes to deleting an account. Once you’re logged into Twitter, go to the Settings wheel in the upper right-hand corner of the page, and select Settings from the drop-down menu. You will be taken to your Account page. Scroll all the way to the bottom, where you’ll see a link to deactivate your account. You’ll have to reenter your Twitter password once more to confirm the deletion.

Your tweets may still be viewable for a few days, and the company relinquishes responsibility for any of your tweets that may have been cached by Google or other search engines.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn can feel pretty sticky, because even after an account is deleted, users may still get LinkedIn-related emails. Go to the Privacy & Settings page, click on Accounts, and then look for tiny text that says “Helpful Links.” In that section, there should be an option to close your account. You’ll have to click through a few more pages and give a reason for leaving before closing your account.

As with Twitter, LinkedIn warns users that removing public-facing aspects of your profile from search engines like Yahoo and Google will take more time.

I also asked LinkedIn if there was any way to permanently ward off LinkedIn emails after you’ve deleted your profile. LinkedIn said it purges users’ email addresses 30 days after an account is deleted, but if a member invites a non-member, the non-member will still receive a LinkedIn invite in their inbox.

Yahoo: Deleting a Yahoo account is simple, but since there are many popular apps and services tied to Yahoo, you’ll want to be certain that you’re okay with trashing these, too. First, go to Yahoo.com and look for Help, usually in tiny text on the lower right-hand corner of the homepage. In the search bar at the top of the Help page, type “close account.” The first result should be “Closing Your Yahoo Account.” Click on this. From there, go to Account Termination page, where you’ll be prompted to sign in, reenter your password once more, and confirm the deletion.

AOL: You’ll never forget your first email account (or “You’ve got mail!”). But for some people, nostalgia might not be enough to justify keeping an account open. On the AOL homepage, scroll down to the very bottom and click Help. In the search bar, type “close account.” Two results should come up, one that guides you in deleting your free AOL.com account, and one that tells you how to cancel a paid-for account. For the former, sign in, select “Change My AOL Plan” and then hit “Cancel plan.” You’ll have to give a reason for canceling, and then you can close your account.

But, as with Yahoo, closing your AOL account means that you’re also canceling other services — like AIM.

Google+: Google splits its services up so you don’t throw your Gmail out with the Google+ bathwater, but this makes the process slightly more confusing. First, log in and go to Account. Scroll down to Account Management, select Delete Profile, and remove related Google+ features. You’ll be presented with two options.

If you just opt to delete your Google+ account, you’re deleting Google+-specific content, like your circles of friends, your “+1”s and your timeline activity. However, you’re not deleting public information you’ve set on your profile. The next step is deleting your Google user profile, which deletes your public-facing name and photo.

There’s actually a third option — deleting your entire Google account — but that one wipes out everything Google, including your Gmail and YouTube accounts.

Google said it takes a few days for your Google+ content to be deleted and, as with LinkedIn, you can delete your account, but there’s nothing stopping others from inviting you to join and connect through the service.

Apple, Amazon and Netflix: Amazon, Apple and Netflix are different from the others, mostly because they offer paid services and require your credit card information. They’re also different because they require interaction with customer support in order to delete an account. This can be a pretty circuitous process (I was sent through multiple channels of Apple support when I asked about deleting an ID). The companies want to verify that it’s you for security reasons, but I also suspect that some want to make it tough to leave.

With something like an Apple ID, you’ll lose all apps and copyright-protected iTunes content associated with that ID when you delete it. Netflix doesn’t even delete accounts — it “cancels” your paid subscription, but still retains your account information. If you want to erase all credit card info you have to contact support. Amazon makes it easy to delete payment information, but try to delete your account and you’ll be greeted with this.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130916/a-handy-guide-to-deleting-digital-accounts/feed/0Jawbone Hires Leading Data Scientist to Help Take Wearable Tech to Next Levelhttp://allthingsd.com/20130728/jawbone-hires-leading-data-scientist-to-help-take-wearable-tech-to-next-level/
http://allthingsd.com/20130728/jawbone-hires-leading-data-scientist-to-help-take-wearable-tech-to-next-level/#commentsMon, 29 Jul 2013 01:41:12 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=346720Jawbone, maker of Bluetooth audio speakers and also the wearable Up activity tracker, has hired leading data scientist Monica Rogati as a VP of data for the Bay Area-based startup. Rogati joins Jawbone from LinkedIn, where she was a senior data scientist and had worked to build features such as “People You May Know” and “Groups You May Like.” In recent months, Jawbone has acquired data and digital design firms Massive Health and Visere, as well as BodyMedia, to bolster its position in the wearable health and fitness space. Rogati’s hire was reported earlier by TechCrunch.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130728/jawbone-hires-leading-data-scientist-to-help-take-wearable-tech-to-next-level/feed/0Comparing Wearables: Fitbit Flex vs. Jawbone Up and Morehttp://allthingsd.com/20130715/fitbit-flex-vs-jawbone-up-and-more-a-wearables-comparison/
http://allthingsd.com/20130715/fitbit-flex-vs-jawbone-up-and-more-a-wearables-comparison/#commentsMon, 15 Jul 2013 13:00:51 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=341821“Which is better, the FuelBand or the Up?” “What do you think about the Fitbit Flex?”

I’ve been hearing questions like these a lot lately. Wearable “activity trackers” — not long ago a niche product — are getting more popular, and people are wondering how they work and whether they’re worth it.

I decided to wear a bunch of trackers simultaneously for a period of 10 days to really get a sense of their features and, more importantly, their accuracy.

The four I’ve been wearing — the Jawbone Up, the Nike+ FuelBand, the Fitbit Flex and the Basis Band — all perform the same basic function: They go on your wrist, they use accelerometers to measure your steps and activity levels throughout the day, and they send that data to an app on your mobile phone. Otherwise, their feature sets vary.

So, which band is best for you, and which is the most accurate? Read on.

Comfort and Design

Design-wise, my top pick is the Jawbone Up. It’s cool-looking and simply wraps around the wrist, like a coil bracelet — no clasp or snap needed. The Fitbit Flex gives Up some stiff — or rather, flexible — competition. It’s also made of a soft, comfortable elastomer, although, the band needs to be clasped on the underside of the wrist.

Fitbit Flex

The Basis Band is a watch, not a band. It definitely looks more like a gadget watch than a fashion one, but it’s relatively lightweight. The Nike+ FuelBand is chunky and unbending, and every time I snap it shut on my wrist, I’m afraid I might catch a wad of my flesh in it.

Beyond comfort, though, there’s something else to keep in mind: Displays. Both the Nike+ FuelBand and the Basis Band will show you — right on the band — the time of day, the number of steps you’ve taken, and the number of calories you’ve burned. Over time, I grew to appreciate that I could see this data without having to pull out my phone and sync the bands, like the others.

Mobile Syncing

Most of the bands use Bluetooth to wirelessly sync your activity data to your mobile phone. Up is the only one that requires you to attach the band to your phone, via the phone’s audio jack, for syncing. I used to find this strangely satisfying to do once or twice a day to check my progress. But then the Fitbit Flex’s super-fast wireless syncing sort of blew me away.

I don’t want to gloss over the mobile apps, as I feel the compatible apps are a huge part of the activity-tracking experience. They’re where users log their food intake, or link to other mobile apps, such as RunKeeper, to get a more comprehensive look at their daily habits. But accuracy is a key focus of this column, and I want to get to that.

I will say this, though, about the apps: I have 17 friends using the Up, nine friends on Fitbit, zero friends using Basis, and a couple of friends on the Nike+ FuelBand app (though I know for a fact that more of my friends are using Nike+ — we’re just not connected through the app). I’ve found that having more friends wearing the same band greatly enhances the overall experience.

Also, in my first column about the Nike+ FuelBand, I wrote that Nike “Fuel” — the company’s proprietary currency for measuring your exertion levels (using an algorithm based on oxygen kinetics) — felt sort of arbitrary. After giving the FuelBand and app a second try, I still feel that way.

Accuracy

When it comes to accuracy, your hips don’t lie.

It’s pretty much universally recognized, even by the creators of these bands, that a standard hip pedometer will give a more accurate measurement of your steps than an activity wristband. Wristbands can register “false positives” — you could, for example, be sitting at your desk but if you wave your arms wildly, the band will read it as activity. Conversely, you could be walking briskly but pushing a stroller and not pumping your arms, which could affect the reading.

All of the companies have built their bands with these factors in mind. But I wanted to put them to the test myself.

I wore a Timex hip pedometer ($30) while wearing all four bands on my wrist. I was completely decked out and utterly dorktastic. I mapped out a mile in my neighborhood, using Google Maps, RunKeeper data and also the pedometer’s mileage gauge. I did this walk almost every day for a week, comparing each band’s calculations at the start and finish of the mile.

For short-term activity tracking, the Jawbone Up and Fitbit Flex tended to be the most accurate. The Nike+ FuelBand and Basis Band were more consistently on the conservative side, and the Basis Band sometimes gave some super-low readings.

Here’s a sample day, with the pedometer registering 2,165 steps at one mile: The Up measured 2,166 steps, the Basis Band 2,157 steps, the Flex 2,140 steps, and the Nike+ FuelBand 2,076 steps.

But on another test day, when I walked slightly over a mile, the pedometer registered 2,382 steps, the Up measured 2,339, the Flex 2,290, the FuelBand 2,103 and the Basis Band a bizarre 1,614.

Jawbone Up

I also conducted a few whole-day tests, during which I was mostly working at my desk but also walked around the neighborhood, and found that all four bands registered more steps than the basic hip pedometer. In one such test, the pedometer registered 7,428 steps, while the Basis Band tracked 7,736 steps, the FuelBand measured 7,905 steps, the Up 8,369 steps and the Fitbit Flex 8,400 steps.

That’s a lot of false positives, if you believe the hip pedometer. The Up and the Flex can be further calibrated for accuracy — you basically “tell” the band you’ve walked an exact distance and it adjusts your steps accordingly — but I didn’t notice a huge difference after I did this.

Nike+ FuelBand

One element of these bands I’m skeptical of is the sleep-tracking function. Up and Fitbit Flex use their respective accelerometers to measure your movement — tossing and turning or lack thereof — while you’re sleeping. Basis gets more technical, using both accelerometry and your heart rate.

It had been a week of terrible sleep for me, and the bands recorded the gist of that — five hours here, six hours there. But Basis consistently showed that I was never interrupted during my sleep, which isn’t accurate, because I took a late phone call one night after going to bed. On my one great night of sleep, Up recorded that I got a solid eight hours, but that most of it was light sleep, which I found hard to believe.

Battery

All of these bands claim to last several days on a single charge. In my experience, the Jawbone Up and Nike+ FuelBand have lasted the longest — almost a full 10 days. The Fitbit Flex gave the low-battery signal after six days. The Basis Band died that same night, while I was sleeping (which is impressive — considering that the Basis Band has a full display).

Conclusion

I really liked having a heart-rate reading on my wrist all day with the Basis Band. And, as I said before, I like the Up’s design and mobile app.

But my conclusion is that the Fitbit Flex is actually the best all-around band for your buck. It’s pretty accurate. Its wireless data-syncing is amazingly fast. It works with both iPhone and Android. It records sleep, if you’re into that, and it has a comprehensive food-tracking system. It’s comfortable, and it’s the least expensive at $100.

I think activity trackers will be more precise in the near future, and some will actually include high-tech heart-rate sensors, and possibly displays. Until then, they’re a mixed bag.

Just remember: You have to actually get up and move for them to work!

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130715/fitbit-flex-vs-jawbone-up-and-more-a-wearables-comparison/feed/0RunKeeper Adds More Food Tracking With MyFitnessPal Pair-Uphttp://allthingsd.com/20130625/runkeeper-adds-more-food-tracking-with-myfitnesspal-pair-up/
http://allthingsd.com/20130625/runkeeper-adds-more-food-tracking-with-myfitnesspal-pair-up/#commentsTue, 25 Jun 2013 14:00:21 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=336145RunKeeper, the popular GPS-based mobile app for runners, is adding more food-tracking features to the app through a partnership with MyFitnessPal, a free calorie counter and nutrition tracker. Exercise data entered in RunKeeper will now impact daily calorie allotment in MyFitnessPal, and the calories logged via MyFitnessPal will appear in the RunKeeper app. RunKeeper, which is free and runs on iPhone and Android devices, has 20 million mobile users, while MyFitnessPal claims 40 million users. RunKeeper also syncs data from Up by Jawbone, Fitbit, Withings and Lose It!, to name a few apps.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130625/runkeeper-adds-more-food-tracking-with-myfitnesspal-pair-up/feed/0Max Levchin's Glow Fertility App: The Full D11 Session (Video)http://allthingsd.com/20130529/max-levchins-glow-fertility-app-the-full-session-video/
http://allthingsd.com/20130529/max-levchins-glow-fertility-app-the-full-session-video/#commentsWed, 29 May 2013 20:05:29 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=326545It’s not often — or ever — that we discuss things like “cervical mucus” at the D conference, but Max Levchin’s new app pretty much necessitated the phrase.

In fact, he said it no fewer than five times.

Called Glow, the free iPhone app uses advanced data analytics to measure and alert a woman to her fertility cycles, based on the information she shares (including menstrual cycles and, yes, the texture of her cervical mucus).

Levchin appeared onstage today to demo the new app for Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, facing tough questions about the app, and quickly became a buzzed-about topic of conversation at the conference.

Part of Levchin’s goal isn’t just to get women pregnant, but also to present a new financial model for health care. Glow includes a voluntary Glow mutual fund to which women can contribute $50 a month for future fertility treatments. Levchin plans to kickstart the fund with $1 million from his own pocket.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130529/max-levchins-glow-fertility-app-the-full-session-video/feed/0Phone Firms Sell Data on Customershttp://allthingsd.com/20130522/phone-firms-sell-data-on-customers/
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/phone-firms-sell-data-on-customers/#commentsWed, 22 May 2013 15:30:04 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=324323Big phone companies have begun to sell the vast troves of data they gather about their subscribers’ locations, travels and Web-browsing habits.

The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130522/phone-firms-sell-data-on-customers/feed/0Online Ads Can Now Follow You Homehttp://allthingsd.com/20130430/online-ads-can-now-follow-you-home/
http://allthingsd.com/20130430/online-ads-can-now-follow-you-home/#commentsTue, 30 Apr 2013 15:00:44 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=316689Advertisers already know what people are up to on their personal computers. But understanding their online whereabouts on smartphones or tablets has remained elusive.

A number of companies are trying to better pinpoint mobile users’ online activity with new software and techniques they say could help advertisers track users across devices.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130430/online-ads-can-now-follow-you-home/feed/0Jawbone Acquires BodyMedia for More Than $100 Million, as Wearable Tech Gets More Intensehttp://allthingsd.com/20130430/jawbone-acquires-bodymedia-for-more-than-100-million-as-wearable-tech-gets-more-intense/
http://allthingsd.com/20130430/jawbone-acquires-bodymedia-for-more-than-100-million-as-wearable-tech-gets-more-intense/#commentsTue, 30 Apr 2013 13:00:45 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=316570Looking to gain even more traction in the wearable health and fitness market, Jawbone is snapping up another health product company.

The Bay Area-based private company has acquired BodyMedia, Inc., a 14-year-old Pittsburgh-based company that makes health-monitoring armbands.

Jawbone acquired BodyMedia for more than $100 million, according to people familiar with the deal, although both companies declined to give more specifics about the financials of the deal.

So what’s the appeal of BodyMedia for Jawbone? Unlike the Massive Health and Visere buys, which were mainly for talent acquisition, BodyMedia’s value lies in both the team and the company’s patents. BodyMedia has had more than 80 patents issued over the years, many in the area of multi-sensor technology. As a combined entity, BodyMedia and Jawbone will have over 300 patents issued and filed.

While the $130 Jawbone Up wristband does many things — it tracks activity levels and sleep patterns, and works with a compatible mobile app for Android and iOS to log food consumption — it lacks some of the high-tech sensors that BodyMedia’s products have.

“I think the first phase of this market has been about accelerometers and what those can do,” Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said in an interview. “Now it’s about getting even more granular, and also, how we can get all that tech into an efficient form factor.”

To that point, BodyMedia’s armbands, which will continue to be sold for the time being, contain four different types of sensors, which measure your skin temperature, heat flux, galvanic skin response (GSR) and overall movement.

But compared with the wristband form factor of the Jawbone Up, the BodyMedia bands are bigger, bulkier products. Earlier this year, BodyMedia introduced a slimmed-down version of its health-tracking band, called the Core 2, to compete in the growing category of barely noticeable, 24/7 wearable fitness devices.

So can we expect to see a Jawbone wristband with GSR sensors anytime soon? “We’re working on lots of things,” was all Rahman would say, adding, “We’re exploring where we would see sensors working, and how we can put more and more on top of the body.”

The BodyMedia team will stay in Pittsburgh and will remain intact, both companies say. BodyMedia’s Chris Robins will no longer serve as CEO of the company, and will instead become the general manager of BodyMedia and a vice president of business development at Jawbone.

Jawbone also said today that it’s opening up its Up mobile software to ten different fitness-app makers, including RunKeeper, MyFitnessPal, LoseIt, Withings, Sleepio and IFTTT (for workout prompts). Jawbone Up users with iOS devices will now be able to share data to and from these partner apps with the Up app.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130430/jawbone-acquires-bodymedia-for-more-than-100-million-as-wearable-tech-gets-more-intense/feed/0How and Why We Track: Confessions of an Ad "Tracking" Companyhttp://allthingsd.com/20130314/how-and-why-we-track-confessions-of-an-ad-tracking-company/
http://allthingsd.com/20130314/how-and-why-we-track-confessions-of-an-ad-tracking-company/#commentsThu, 14 Mar 2013 21:43:14 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=303758In tech, everything moves quickly. So quickly, that there are times when a topic gains so much steam that the nomenclature and hyperbole used to discuss the topic are effectively separated from the technology that enabled it (see, “Cloud Computing,” “Big Data” and “SoLoMo”). The latest, persistent example in the ad industry is the ongoing debate about online tracking, a topic that includes increasingly muddled discussions around specific technologies, preferences and implementations including do-not-track signals, consumer choice and third-party cookies.

Mozilla’s recent announcement to block all third-party cookies by default in the new version of Firefox has sparked renewed interest in these topics, and as you would expect, opinions vary wildly depending on perspective and priorities. Reactions from those representing the ad industry predominantly have been critical, while many privacy advocates have applauded the decision. My reaction was one of frustration for several reasons, but one in particular that is relevant to this discussion — my company builds and sells a product that is used by advertisers and ad agencies to “track” what is happening online.

Common Theme, Different Issues

To adequately discuss privacy, you must first define what it is you’re discussing. Currently, there are two major movements being debated, both of which involve the way Web browsers and providers of online content (predominantly publishers and advertisers) exchange and store information.

First, the Do Not Track (DNT) HTTP header was designed in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is intended to provide consumers with a standard way to indicate to Web applications, digital advertisers and publishers they do not wish to have their behavior tracked across Web properties. All major browsers currently support this feature and the industry is moving toward adopting it as a standard; however, last year Microsoft announced that beginning with Internet Explorer 10, it would enable DNT by default, subsequently causing widespread confusion since the header was designed to be opt-in, not opt-out. For this reason, the vast majority of publishers and advertisers currently ignore all stated DNT preferences, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Mozilla’s recent announcement involves a separate debate about whether or not browsers will accept third-party cookies. For the uninitiated, cookies are small files that include data that allow your computer to interact with the websites you visit. Third-party cookies traditionally are set by advertising companies and analytics firms, such as mine, to help understand what is happening on a website over a certain period of time. Prior to Mozilla’s announcement, only Safari blocked third-party cookies by default among the major browser providers. However, Mozilla’s market share (approximately 20 percent according to Net Applications) is much larger than Safari’s and represents “critical mass,” thus the renewed interest in this topic.

Why We Track

Companies track information online for different reasons. In the analytics world, our business is one of scale. Unlike behavioral targeting, our business model is predicated on the ability to identify correlation across millions of advertising “events” and making recommendations based on huge data sets across large-scale media campaigns.

Typically, advertisers purchase huge inventories of ads across a large number of sites their desired audiences frequent. Each of these ads has a different price associated with it, which increasingly is determined by demand and effectiveness. To make sure they get what they pay for, advertisers often choose to work with an analytics firm to better understand which ad campaigns and channels (search, display, etc.) are more effective and why. As a simple example, browser cookies allow us to determine which advertising is resonating with consumers and how many times that message should be displayed before it gets annoying and loses effectiveness, allowing advertisers to avoid waste and poor experiences.

Unintended Consequences

By most estimates, the first online ad appeared roughly 20 years ago. As a technology, cookies have been used for almost as long. They also serve as a fundamental component that underpins the economics of the open web. Small and upcoming publishers rely on the data provided through third-party advertising technologies to quantify and price the “real estate” accompanying their content, often selling ad inventory as part of large-scale networks that provide reach and attract larger advertising customers. Without these networks, it’s difficult to see these publishers attracting ad revenue necessary to compete and offer high-quality, ad-supported content. Paywalls will also become more prevalent for those publishers that have sufficient resources and audiences to support them.

Also, by eliminating the ability for publishers/advertisers to price and purchase higher-quality placements based on relevance, you can expect a return to “spray and pray” tactics where ad inventory prices plummet and the total number of ads displayed and purchased rises drastically. In other words, if you think some ads are disruptive today, get ready to see much more aggressive tactics employed.

Lastly, while cookies are a relatively mature technology with existing browser controls, industry opt-outs and comprehensive privacy policies, there are alternate tracking approaches that don’t have the same level of consumer control. These alternate methods — including device fingerprinting, flash cookies, local storage, etc. — represent the Wild West of tracking technologies. They are very difficult to detect, lack proper controls and can be abused by fringe tracking companies. None of them represent progress or improvement for the customer.

Choice

The advertising community takes privacy seriously and we agree with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), National Advertising Initiative, Digital Advertising Alliance and other organizations advocating for the continued development of existing consumer-choice mechanisms. We welcome participation from Mozilla and other browser vendors that seek to deliver easy and transparent privacy solutions to consumers; however, these need to be developed in concert with both advertisers and publishers to be effective.

Paul Pellman is the CEO of Adometry, Inc., a marketing analytics provider that generates insights about the performance of marketing campaigns through combining and interpreting advertising data from online and offline channels. Prior to joining Adometry, he was executive vice president of marketing for Hoover’s.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130314/how-and-why-we-track-confessions-of-an-ad-tracking-company/feed/2Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplacehttp://allthingsd.com/20130307/tracking-sensors-invade-the-workplace/
http://allthingsd.com/20130307/tracking-sensors-invade-the-workplace/#commentsThu, 07 Mar 2013 15:00:07 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=301277A few years ago when Bank of America Corp. wanted to study whether face time mattered among its call-center teams, the big bank asked about 90 workers to wear badges for a few weeks with tiny sensors to record their movements and the tone of their conversations.

The data showed that the most productive workers belonged to close-knit teams and spoke frequently with their colleagues. So, to get more employees mingling, the bank scheduled workers for group breaks, rather than solo ones.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130307/tracking-sensors-invade-the-workplace/feed/0Moves App Journals Physical Activity Without a Wristbandhttp://allthingsd.com/20130124/moves-app-journals-physical-activity-without-a-wristband/
http://allthingsd.com/20130124/moves-app-journals-physical-activity-without-a-wristband/#commentsThu, 24 Jan 2013 17:00:02 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=285209Moves launches today as a free iPhone app available worldwide to help people track their physical activity and keep a daily journal of it.

The main Moves interface is a neat-looking personal daily timeline, with proportional representation of time spent walking, running, biking, and in transit, in a vertical display that links together all the locations visited within 24 hours.

The app uses adaptive techniques to minimize battery drain by drawing cell-tower data most of the time, and then activating GPS when the accelerometer moves in a recognized way.

It’s made by a Helsinki-based company called ProtoGeo that is led by designer Sampo Karjalainen, a founder of kids’ virtual world Habbo Hotel.

Karjalainen thinks Moves can be a viable alternative to the Fitbit, Nike FuelBand and Jawbone Up, because it doesn’t require people to buy an additional device and keep it charged.

And besides, wristband-based sensors are not terribly sophisticated, anyway — many people find that they only approximate a measure of their physical activity, and they do a terrible job of tracking cycling, since it’s a stiff-wristed sport.

So the two big questions are 1) Is Moves accurate? And 2) Will it kill my phone battery?

This isn’t a product review, but I’d say that in two weeks of using the app my answers would be 1) It’s pretty accurate, but not as accurate as constant GPS tracking. And 2) It will have an impact on your battery, but not as bad as constant GPS tracking.

You may still want to use an additional app like Endomondo or RunKeeper to track workouts. I found that Moves was particularly bad at counting my mileage on the treadmill at the gym.

Karjalainen told me that Moves users can hold their phones normally — in their pocket or bag is fine — and the service has learned patterns of movement that correspond to various activities.

His goal is for Moves to be an everyday, mainstream tool to make people more conscious of their physical activity. It’s all about low-effort record-keeping. For instance, a future feature that Karjalainen mentioned would be interspersing photos from the day throughout the timeline.

I’d previously experimented with using Alohar Mobile’s Placeme app to passively track all the locations I visited on a daily basis, but Moves’ timeline interface seems more interesting and informative than a map of everywhere I’ve been (plus, Moves has a map view, too).

ProtoGeo has raised $1.6 million in seed funding from Lifeline Ventures and PROfounders.

That’s the basic premise behind all of these new activity trackers you might be hearing about. And I’ve tested quite a few of them throughout the past year.

I didn’t love the Nike+ Fuelband, primarily because I thought its arbitrary currency system, “fuel,” was not an ideal way to measure exertion. And I left the Fitbit clipped to sports bras too often, which meant the thing ended up sitting in my laundry pile.

I do like the Jawbone Up, however, for both its physical form factor and its app. In general, I’m very intrigued by this new category in tech, and I think there could be real value in it for consumers.

Initially, you would think Larklife works just like all of the other bands. It measures steps. It measures sleep. It connects via Bluetooth to an iOS app that catalogs your progress and offers suggestions for leading a more healthful lifestyle.

But Larklife didn’t make me feel like I was measuring or managing anything very well. It actually made me feel sort of dumb, or that I must be doing something wrong if I couldn’t “get” how this activity band was supposed to work. The band itself was clunky. And there are two of them: One for day and one for nighttime wearing.

The Larklife day band is a rubbery rectangular wristband. It’s skinny on the bottom and fatter on the top and sides, reminding me more of a bangle bracelet or, worse, a house-arrest anklet, than the latest wave of slim activity-tracking bands. Currently it only comes in bright blue. More than a few people noticed it on my wrist this week.

The Larklife’s activity-tracking tech — an accelerometer — is nested in a chunk of the band that’s removable. In order to charge the band, you must remove this portion and plug a proprietary charging wire into the band.

This same small chunk of the band is what you’re supposed to snap into the nighttime Larklife, a more comfortable cloth band, for sleep monitoring. So, to be clear, you don’t really need the second Larklife band, because you can just wear the rubbery one to bed, but it’s a more comfortable option for sleep.

There’s a strip of small blue lights on the band, along with a skinny button that you use to sync the Larklife with its free companion app.

Larklife syncs with the app using low-energy Bluetooth. You could, theoretically, just activate Bluetooth on your iPhone whenever you want to sync your data, but Larklife is really supposed to be talking to the app throughout the day, which means leaving Bluetooth turned on all the time.

I tested Larklife during CES in Las Vegas last week, while I was out and about and often not near a power outlet, and some days I didn’t want to risk draining my iPhone’s battery even the slightest bit by leaving Bluetooth on. I much prefer the Jawbone Up method of syncing, which requires that you physically plug the band into your iPhone’s audio jack a few times a day. This is not only low-maintenance, but satisfying, because you’re very aware of when you’re uploading fresh data.

With these activity-tracking bands, the software component is just as important as the hardware. Larklife takes a different approach from others by focusing on simplicity and positive encouragement. Days are displayed as big circles, with a spattering of activity points and achievements within each circle.

After a few days of using the Larklife band, I was getting notifications from the app like, “It’s 4:00 pm. If you’re feeling sluggish, have a glass of water or a piece of fruit.” The app would cheer me on if I hit a milestone of 10,000 steps in a day.

And Larklife is supposed to automatically recognizes when your activity gets more intense, so it would know when I was running a few miles on the treadmill instead of walking around a convention center. I would check the app and see a “running man” figure that marked my activity in that day’s bubble, or a star for my step milestone.

But the app’s food tracking is incredibly limited compared with other apps. Fitbit lets you set weight goals, track food items and measure calories consumed. Jawbone Up also offers caloric estimates for logged foods, and has a cool cloud graph that made me painfully aware of how much coffee and sugar I’ve been consuming.

Larklife’s app doesn’t come with a data set for calories. After I would manually log that I was having a meal, I could edit that meal name to say “Caesar salad,” for example, and then I could select from the food categories: Protein, Vegetable, Fruit, Grain and Water. That’s it.

Lark says it’s really focused on getting people to live a more healthy lifestyle in general, without making things too complicated. So, even if a Larklife user simply starts to realize that he or she isn’t entering in vegetables often enough, that’s one step in the right direction, Lark says. But if I’m going to log my food, I want more specific data.

Lastly, I couldn’t figure out how to track my sleep with the Larklife band. As it turns out, you’re supposed to go into the app, tap the “plus” icon, select sleep, set your alarm and then, while the band is synced to your iPhone, press the skinny button on the band until the app tells you the syncing has been a success. Either I didn’t set this correctly or inadvertently pressed the button again in my sleep, because I could never get a solid reading on my sleep data.

In terms of battery life, Larklife says that each band should last around two full days. I actually got more use out of mine. I charged it fully on Monday of last week, and the battery died early Thursday. But I also wasn’t constantly connecting the band to my iPhone via Bluetooth.

In the activity-tracking race, Lark puts in good effort but doesn’t quite measure up to the competition.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130114/in-activity-tracking-race-larklife-band-comes-up-short/feed/2Activity-Tracking Tech Moves From Wrist to Neck, With Sculley's New Shine Necklacehttp://allthingsd.com/20121217/activity-tracking-tech-moves-from-wrist-to-neck-with-sculleys-new-shine-necklace/
http://allthingsd.com/20121217/activity-tracking-tech-moves-from-wrist-to-neck-with-sculleys-new-shine-necklace/#commentsMon, 17 Dec 2012 16:00:11 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=278463Activity-tracking wristbands like the Nike+ FuelBand and the Jawbone Up are becoming all the rage.

But what if they’re just too clunky for you?

That’s the problem former Apple CEO John Sculley and business partner Sonny Vu have been tackling with the Misfit Shine. Under the company name Misfit Wearables, the duo recently came up with a metallic activity tracker the size of a quarter; it can be worn as an elegant bracelet or go almost unnoticed as a pocket clip.

Now, after crossing the $500,000 mark on Indiegogo.com, where Misfit is raising money to fund production of the Shine, Sculley and Vu are moving all that compressed tracking tech from the wrist to the neck. The company plans to make a leather activity-tracking necklace, designed with a small, connective metal pendant that users can click the Shine device onto. You can take a look at the picture above for an idea of what the Shine looks like; Misfit says images of the necklace design aren’t available yet.

Like the Shine wrist gadget, the necklace will then track activity levels, including steps taken, and share the data to apps on the iPhone 4, iPhone 5 and most Android devices. It uses Wi-Fi, not Bluetooth, to share the data, and in addition to tracking basic activity levels, it will record aerobic activities like running, cycling and swimming, since it’s waterproof.

But it doesn’t track sleep patterns, unlike the Jawbone Up, Fitbit or Lark bands, and the company hasn’t integrated any kind of food-monitoring system into the Misfit Shine, either.

“We do think the user experience isn’t complete without great software,” Vu said in an interview with AllThingsD. “But if you don’t wear the product in the first place, there’s no start. There’s no data start. So we really think the whole thing starts with wearability.”

Vu says Misfit plans to sell the necklace accessory for $79 at retail, though preorders on Indiegogo will cost either $49 for just the necklace, or $199 for the Shine-plus-necklace package.

Philips Electronics makes a similar product, called DirectLife, that costs $149 and can be worn as a necklace. But that product requires the user to plug the activity monitor directly into their computer, via USB, to transfer data.

Misfit Wearables expects to ship the Shine in a few months (although, as we have seen with some of these crowdfunded gadgets, delays are always possible).

The start-up is based in San Francisco, and in addition to crowdfunding money for production, is backed by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20121217/activity-tracking-tech-moves-from-wrist-to-neck-with-sculleys-new-shine-necklace/feed/2They Know What You're Shopping Forhttp://allthingsd.com/20121208/they-know-what-youre-shopping-for/
http://allthingsd.com/20121208/they-know-what-youre-shopping-for/#commentsSat, 08 Dec 2012 17:03:24 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=276211Georgia resident Andy Morar is in the market for a BMW. So recently he sent a note to a showroom near Atlanta, using a form on the dealer’s website to provide his name and contact information.

His note went to the dealership—but it also went, without his knowledge, to a company that tracks car shoppers online. In a flash, an analysis of the auto websites Mr. Morar had anonymously visited could be paired with his real name and studied by his local car dealer.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20121208/they-know-what-youre-shopping-for/feed/0Professor to Try to Salvage Troubled “Do Not Track” Dealhttp://allthingsd.com/20121127/professor-to-try-to-salvage-troubled-do-not-track-deal/
http://allthingsd.com/20121127/professor-to-try-to-salvage-troubled-do-not-track-deal/#commentsWed, 28 Nov 2012 07:13:51 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=273321Ohio State Law professor Peter Swire has agreed to step in to try to salvage contentious negotiations between privacy advocates and the online advertising industry over how to block unwanted online tracking.

However, the appointment of Mr. Swire, who served as chief counselor for privacy in the Clinton Administration, is unlikely to result in a do-not-track deal by the end of this year, as previously promised.

Earlier this year, a coalition of Internet giants agreed to support a do-not-track button that would let Web users block tracking with a single privacy setting in their Web browser. Currently, Web users who want to turn off tracking must install tracking files from more than 100 companies, alerting those companies that they do not want to be tracked.

“Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction. In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them. It basically means that the DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent.”

Such a move should make Yahoo very popular with advertisers, most of which are publicly and privately decrying the Microsoft effort for their browser having advertising targeting and tracking turned off by default.

In fact, Yahoo’s statement of no-default-respect pretty much tracks on what the Digital Advertising Alliance, which represents thousands of major marketers, said recently, as well as the Association of National Advertisers.

Both those groups and many others are seeking to kill DNT.

According to sources, the impetus for the Yahoo decision was CEO Marissa Mayer, a former Google exec.

“Just because the signal is turned on doesn’t mean that a consumer wants no services that involve tracking. It means instead that consumers are empowered to make their own choices, including selecting services that involve tracking from advertisers and ad networks they trust.”

Here’s the whole post, and here is a really good New York Times piece on the controversy, including talks taking place via an international group working on global DNT standards, called the World Wide Web Consortium:

In Support of a Personalized User Experience

Friday, October 26th, 2012

At Yahoo!, we aspire to make the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining. Our users have come to expect a personalized Yahoo! experience tailor-made for their lives — whether they’re checking local weather, sports scores, stock quotes, daily news, or viewing ads on our site. We fundamentally believe that the online experience is better when it is personalized.

That said, we also believe that there should be an easy and transparent way for users to express their privacy preferences to Yahoo!. That’s why we offer our own tools and resources such as Ad Interest Manager, to give users more control over personalized advertising on Yahoo!, and why we participate in industry-wide programs such as AdChoices, which allows users to learn why they’ve been shown an ad.

Yahoo! has been working with our partners in the Internet industry to come up with a standard that allows users to opt out of certain website analytics and ad targeting. In principle, we support “Do Not Track” (DNT). Unfortunately, because discussions have not yet resulted in a final standard for how to implement DNT, the current DNT signal can easily be abused. Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction. In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them. It basically means that the DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent.

Ultimately, we believe that DNT must map to user intent — not to the intent of one browser creator, plug-in writer, or third-party software service. Therefore, although Yahoo! will continue to offer Ad Interest Manager and other tools, we will not recognize IE10’s default DNT signal on Yahoo! properties at this time.

Yahoo! is committed to working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to reach a DNT standard that both satisfies user expectations and provides the best Internet experience possible. We will closely evaluate our support for DNT as the industry makes progress in reaching a meaningful, transparent standard to promote choice, reduce signal abuse, and deliver great personalized experiences for our users.

On-the-job personal productivity start-up tenXer has raised $3 million in a Series B round, which it said it will use to accelerate growth outside its software industry market.

The San Francisco company, which was founded by longtime entrepreneur Jeff Ma, makes tools to allow a user or perhaps a company, track performance and progress using a number of different metrics. The presumable goal is to use social and gaming elements, along with this activity data, to help you do your job 10 times better.

Get it with the tenXer name now?

The new funding is led by True Ventures, and its partner, Puneet Agarwal, will join tenXer’s board of directors.

Radar Partners and Khosla Ventures, as well as angel investors, participated in the new round, for what the company describes as a “human capital management platform.”

Currently aimed at tracking the work of software engineers, tenXer integrates current tools such as GitHub, Pivotal Tracker and Jira.

Here’s a video interview with Ma — who gained fame for his gambling prowess as part of the MIT blackjack team, and also was one of the co-founders of Citizen Sports, which was bought by Yahoo in 2010 — about the new round, and also about where tenXer is headed next:

Most of us don’t look so good when we quantify our lives. We exercise less than we think, and eat more. We spend more time thinking about work than working hard. We probably have a higher opinion of ourselves than is warranted.

— Bruce Kasanoff, in a Digital Trends article, referring to the possibility that new technologies may make lying impossible

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120822/no-more-secrets/feed/0In Fight Over Largest Fine Ever, FTC Commissioners Disagreed Over Whether Google Should Admit Faulthttp://allthingsd.com/20120809/in-fight-over-largest-fine-ever-ftc-commissioners-disagreed-over-whether-google-should-admit-fault/
http://allthingsd.com/20120809/in-fight-over-largest-fine-ever-ftc-commissioners-disagreed-over-whether-google-should-admit-fault/#commentsThu, 09 Aug 2012 16:30:10 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=239683As expected, Google will pay $22.5 million to settle with the FTC over violating its October 2011 privacy settlement.

Google is in trouble because it told users of the Safari browser, via a help page, that they did not have to worry about being tracked because Safari blocks cookies by default, while at the same time bypassing Safari settings to allow tracking cookies. Google has since deleted those cookies, and says it never collected personal information.

This is the largest FTC penalty ever for violation of one of its orders — though in tech terms, it’s just a generous Series B funding round or so.

It was decided by a vote of 4-1, with Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch dissenting on the grounds that the FTC should not have accepted Google’s denial of liability.

Rosch, instead, believes that Google is in contempt of the 2011 agreement. “This is Google’s second bite at the apple,” he wrote.

If Google is being fined $22.5 million, Rosch argues, the company should not be permitted to deny liability.

The other commissioners replied, “With a company of Google’s size, almost any penalty can be dismissed as insufficient.” But because the issue didn’t exist for very long, and Google didn’t make money from it, a penalty serves as sufficient warning, they argued.

The FTC also posted today a more technical description of what Google did to bypass Safari’s settings.

Here’s what happened: Despite having that help page up saying that Safari wasn’t tracking users, “for several months in 2011 and 2012,” Google circumvented Safari settings to place a temporary cookie from DoubleClick. This was in part to set up those little +1 social advertising buttons on its ads for users.

And here’s the crux: “Because of the particular operation of the Safari browser, that initial temporary cookie opened the door to all cookies from the DoubleClick domain, including the Google advertising tracking cookie that Google had represented would be blocked from Safari browsers.”

But that’s not actually the crux, because the specific issue that the FTC is mad about is that Google had up the incorrect help page the whole time. This misrepresentation is exactly what Google promised it wouldn’t do in 2011.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said the penalty is meant to send a message that “No matter how big or small, all companies must abide by FTC orders against them and keep their privacy promises to consumers, or they will end up paying many times what it would have cost to comply in the first place.”